Tag: governance

E-scooters in Bristol: their potential contribution to a more sustainable transport system

Posted on by janet.crompton
Voi e-scooter parked across the pavement outside Victoria Rooms in Clifton. Image credit: Georgina de Courcy-Bower

At the end of October this year, the Swedish company Voi launched their e-scooters in Bristol as part of a pilot scheme. The government brought the scheme forward in the hope that e-scooters would ease demand for public transport and allow for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier in the year, Marvin Rees said that he hoped e-scooters would help the city reduce congestion and air pollution. These are two key issues associated with a car-dominated transport system present in Bristol and many other cities around the world.

I have been investigating whether e-scooters could help Bristol to meet its sustainable transport targets. These include meeting net-zero emissions by 2030 and simultaneously reducing inequality within the city. However, between 2005 and 2017 the decrease in CO2 emissions in Bristol’s transport sector was only 9%. To reach net-zero by 2030, there will need to be an 88% decrease from the 2005 baseline.

E-scooters have been called a ‘last mile’ solution to fill the gaps between transport links and homes or offices which could draw more people away from their cars. My research has found that policies towards the new micromobility focused on decreasing transport inequalities in the United States. Conversely in Europe, there was more consideration for the environmental impact, but both continents have policies emphasising the importance of safety.

E-scooters and the environment

Despite cities frequently referencing environmental sustainability, few were found to have policies or regulations to ensure this. There was often an assumption that e-scooter users would previously have made their journey by car. However, in Paris only 8% of users would have driven if e-scooters were not an option. This was higher in the US, with cities consistently having a modal shift from cars of over 30%. However, this was explained by the lower availability of public transport compared with European cities. Therefore, US policies would not have the desired effect in Bristol.

A second environmental consideration is the lifecycle analysis of e-scooters. This shows that e-scooters still produce a significant amount of CO2 emissions, particularly when compared to active travel. E-scooters used as part of a sharing scheme are also frequently vandalised which shortens their lifespan. In UK cities which started their trials before Bristol, operators have already complained of high rates of vandalism. Many are also thrown into rivers which causes ecological impacts.

E-scooters and inequality

Many cities in the US have regulations aiming to improve access to transport for low-income communities. This has included unsuccessful discounted services. Operators have often failed to comply or the schemes have not been marketed. A more successful regulation was rebalancing e-scooters to ensure that some are placed in deprived communities. However, operators have claimed that this is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Using large trucks to move e-scooters around the city will increase CO2 emissions associated with them.

It is important that environmental goals do not come at the cost of excluding certain communities in the city, and vice versa. However, overall the most significant factor for decreasing inequality or decreasing CO2 emissions is which mode the shift comes from.

The most effective way to encourage a modal shift away from cars is to reallocate space to other modes and start designing cities around people. However, making such a significant change in the way we live our lives will be met with backlash from some. E-scooters can help mitigate this by providing an alternative mode of transport that could make the reallocation of road space to micromobilities more politically feasible.

Safety of e-scooters

What can be agreed upon by everyone is that e-scooters must be safe for users and for those around them. The main complaints about e-scooters are that they block pavements for more vulnerable pedestrians and in most cities, e-scooters are banned from pavement riding. Nevertheless, casual observation shows that this is often ignored. However, in Portland it was found that the presence of cycle lanes and lower speed limits decreased e-scooter pavement use by around 30%. In Bristol, 70% of respondents for a Sustrans survey supported building more cycle tracks even if it took space away from other traffic. The presence of cycle tracks could also lead to more active travel which has co-benefits for individual health and wellbeing.

Governance of e-scooters

E-scooters and other shared mobility technologies are part of a change in governance. There is now collaboration between public and private and it is essential that communication between the two is transparent. Local authorities must make clear their goals and set boundaries for operators without restricting them to the extent that they are unable to provide their services.

Overall, e-scooters alone are not going to solve our dysfunctional urban transport systems. However, they might provide a catalyst for more radical change away from the car-dominated city.

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This blog was written by Georgina de Courcy-Bower, a recent graduate from the MSc Environmental Policy and Management course at the University of Bristol. The blog is based on her dissertation which was supervised by Cabot Institute member Dr Sean Fox.

Georgina de Courcey-Bower

 

 

 

Informal power in the city: where does change come from?

Posted on by janet.crompton

An event in December shared the findings of a new collaboration between the University of Bristol and Bristol Pound into the use of informality and how informal approaches at a city level can extend influence, support innovation and ultimately inform policy.

“So, what is informal power? An academic term is ‘informal governance’ and it’s the unseen and undocumented activity that contributes to city and policy change. It might be a conversation in the street, meeting a colleague or friend for coffee, or a networking event where ideas are discussed and developed. To an extent therefore it’s about who you know and who you feel comfortable discussing a new project or approach with, drawing on shared values and aims.

Over the course of this year, Sarah Ayres and myself at the University of Bristol have been working with Ciaran Mundy and colleagues at Bristol Pound to see how our academic understanding could be translated into the way that a city-wide social enterprise could play a part in city leadership, how its values might be shared and ultimately might influence policy. Bristol Pound is a great example of an alternative form of city leadership and it has been really interesting to explore with the staff, directors and city partners how informality works for them. We have found that there are many people in the networks of informality that exist in the city, but that they are not always conscious of how their informal interactions can influence the more formal decisions. As one of our participants said:

‘Informality helps to inform the making of strategy and policy – and informality helps to actually get it done once you’ve got that context in place’

These informal networks can bring together a range of people who might not normally come into contact – but they might also, consciously or unconsciously, perpetuate old power structures. Our aim, through this research, is to recognise how these networks operate – and then to challenge the things that might lead to some people feeling excluded. Happily, many people are keen to challenge the status quo, to seek out new voices and ensure that other views are represented – and informal approaches can be very effective in making new connections and bringing in other perspectives.

Informality is particularly useful where there are new ideas to be tried out, explored and developed and where a formal meeting might limit creativity, reduce the number of people involved and constrain what is discussed. It can be a more flexible and enjoyable way to work, but we also recognise that at some point these informal discussions need to be brought into formal decision making if city change is to happen.

There are many people in the city who feel strongly about making Bristol ‘the best it can be’ – drawing on long-held ‘collegiate’ approaches to city leadership which stretch far beyond the council, incorporating both key city organisations and strong grassroots innovative thinking. If the city of Bristol has always been good at making space for informal approaches and a wider ‘diffused’ city leadership, in resource-strapped times this confidence in alternative approaches can only be helpful – but the reduction in council resources still has an impact. Whilst the council has allowed (or not interfered with) the many activities and collaborations flourishing independently across the city, it has also provided some ‘webbing’ to bring groups and individuals together and facilitate collaboration. There are opportunities in this new void, for other organisations like Bristol£ and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership, to facilitate these informal dialogues across the city, steering a course for more ‘sustainable city with a high quality of life for all’.

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Caroline Bird, a Research Fellow in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. She’s also involved in city initiatives such as the Bristol Energy Network and her research connects across academic and city sectors to share knowledge for urban sustainability.  This blog was reproduced from the Bristol Green Capital Partnership blog.

Yangon’s mobility crisis: A governance problem

Posted on by janet.crompton

A mobility crisis has arisen in Yangon, Myanmar, as growth-induced congestion is slowing travel times for the city’s widely used buses, thereby incentivising car ownership and increasing traffic further. The key cause is poor governance, which manifests itself through fragmented planning, low public infrastructure investment, and a ban on motorcycles and bicycles.

Home to more than 5 million people and producing nearly a quarter of Myanmar’s gross domestic product, this metropolis is once again buzzing with activity as it reopens to the world after decades of military rule. But Yangon’s potential to serve as an engine of economic growth for the nation is being severely undermined by a mobility crisis. As the economy speeds up, the city slows down.

Journey times have skyrocketed in the city as the streets become ever more crowded. Some estimates suggest travel speeds at peak times have dropped from 38 km/h in 2007 to 10-15 km/h in 2015. This slowdown matters for several reasons. First, such high congestion places a significant drag on productivity by raising the cost of doing business and generating friction in the greater Yangon labour market. It is harder for workers to commute to the jobs they are qualified for. Second, the worst affected are the poorest. As a group, they spend the highest share of income on transport and the most time in traffic, which impedes poverty reduction efforts and adds to inequality. Third, air pollution has reached dangerous levels. The World Health Organization finds that Myanmar has some of the worst air pollution in the world, due in part to “inefficient modes of transport”.

The proximate causes: liberalisation and economic growth

Yangon’s mobility crisis is a positive indicator insofar as it reflects robust economic growth. Estimating the city’s growth rate is challenging due to a lack of economic data. However, by exploiting satellite images of night-time lights, which can be used as a rough proxy for economic activity, we can get an idea of the pace of growth. Figures 1 and 2 show images of Yangon at night in 2003 and 2013, respectively. Over this period, the level of luminosity nearly tripled, which we estimate translates into an impressive average annual growth rate in output of 8.5%. Growth appears to have been accelerating, given our estimate that the city grew at an average annual rate of 11.2% between 2008 and 2013.

Figure 1: Luminosity in Yangon Region, 2003

 

Figure 2: Luminosity in Yangon Region, 2013

Since 2011 this growth has been accompanied by a large expansion of personal automobile usage. It was virtually impossible to import automobiles prior to 2011 due to heavy restrictions imposed by the military. The relaxation of vehicle import restrictions, as part of a wider range of liberalisation reforms in recent years, has revealed extensive pent up vehicle demand and allowed a precipitous decline in car prices. Yangon’s burgeoning middle class has jumped at the opportunity to acquire newly imported vehicles and escape the deteriorating bus system. Official figures indicate that there was a 153% increase in registered vehicles in Yangon between 2011 and 2014 alone.

The congestion incentive spiral

The surge in automobile ownership has set in motion a “congestion incentive spiral” that has exacerbated traffic. Prior to liberalisation, buses were by far the dominant mode of transport. The bus system was run as a competitive cartel with a restricted number of private bus owners competing for passengers on similar routes. This incentivised overcrowding, reckless driving, and under-investment in bus fleet maintenance — all of which contributed to congestion and a poor passenger experience.

For those who can afford a car, abandoning the buses is rational. Cars are more comfortable and always quicker than buses. The ability to go directly from origin to destination without stops or transfers significantly reduces the overall journey time. There remains a dilemma: the more people abandon buses, the worse traffic becomes, and the greater the incentive to use private transport. It is an incentive spiral that can only be broken by dramatically increasing the costs of individual car use or by providing an attractive alternative.



Fragmented governance as a root cause

There is no ready alternative to buses and cars in Yangon due to a legacy of poor planning, low public investment, and the fact that motorcycles and bicycles are banned in the city. In fact, there has been no significant investment in public transport infrastructure since the colonial era when the city’s Circular Railway was built. The railway is running and affordable, but its slow speed and limited coverage mean it attracts only a small fraction of Yangon’s commuters.

The emergence of the dysfunctional private bus cartel was an organic response to the lack of alternatives, which in turn was a consequence of the systematic lack of public investment in transport infrastructure and services. This crisis of governance persists today despite the energetic efforts of the current Chief Minister of Yangon, who has driven an impressive reform of the bus system by breaking the cartel and introducing proper public oversight.

An improved bus system, however, will not be enough to break the congestion incentive spiral now that so many people have purchased cars. What is required is a comprehensive and financially viable transport plan developed and implemented by a public transport authority with a metropolitan remit. Currently, the delivery of city infrastructure and services is fragmented across three tiers of government and dozens of agencies and offices. This fragmentation of governance is the true underlying cause of Yangon’s mobility crisis.

A path forward: governance then infrastructure

It is important to frame the problem as a mobility crisis, not a traffic congestion crisis. People can move through cities in many ways, and all large cities have traffic congestion challenges. More prepared cities do not suffer from mobility crises because other transport options are available: bus rapid transit systems that are insulated from traffic; cycling infrastructure; rail networks; and pedestrian-friendly mixed-used developments that reduce the demand for vehicular travel.

Relatively modest public investment could help Yangon. Nonetheless, a bus rapid transit plan announced in 2014 unfortunately appears to have been shelved. The mostly flat topography of Yangon is conducive to cycling. Relaxing restrictions on the use of bicycles on key arteries and in the city centre, combined with modest investments in cycling infrastructure, could provide an affordable alternative mode of individualised transport in the city.

These initiatives require significant governance reforms to succeed. Yangon is projected to join the ranks of the world’s mega-cities (i.e. cities with 10 million or more inhabitants) by 2030. With this growth comes physical expansion, which alters commuting patterns and transport demand. Without a concerted and sustained intervention by a metropolitan-scale transport authority with a mandate to maximise urban mobility, Yangon’s transit woes will surely worsen and further undermine the city’s enormous potential to support Myanmar’s economic renaissance.

This blog is written by Dr Sean Fox (Political Economy of Development & Urban Geography) and originally hosted on the IGC blog.

Brexit, trust and the future of global environmental governance

Posted on by janet.crompton

Post-Brexit vote, we are posting some blogs from our Cabot Institute members outlining their thoughts on Brexit and potential implications for environmental research, environmental law and the environment.  
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Is Brexit the canary in the mine for global environmental governance? 

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has troubling implications for global environmental governance. Water pollution, air pollution, and climate change have no regard for political borders. The world needs supranational political institutions to facilitate a coordinated response to these challenges. The EU is a relatively effective supranational institution for progressive environmental governance. EU nations have enjoyed major improvements in recent decades in areas like air quality, bathing water quality, nature preservation, and acid rain. The EU is one of the most constructive voices in global climate governance.

The decision to leave is therefore likely to present some setbacks with regard to regional environmental governance. But more importantly it signals broad disenchantment with supranational political institutions more generally. People resent and distrust them as distant and undemocratic. And it’s not just the British public that feels this way. The impulse to withdraw and disengage is increasingly evident across Europe and the USA.

This trend is all the more worrying when we look at the profile of the average Leave voter. A recent YouGov survey of British voters found that Leave supporters are deeply distrustful of just about everyone. They don’t much trust academics—as Vote Leave’s Michael Gove put it, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” Nor do they trust the opinions of think tanks, economists, or international organisations like the UN. Just 8 percent trust British politicians. By contrast, a majority of Remain voters generally trust academics, economists, business leaders, and international organisations. (Neither group trusts journalists or, perhaps more positively, celebrities.) But, as we now know, voters for Remain are in the minority.

This ‘trust deficit’ is at the root of the post-factual politics that seems to have taken hold across much of the Western world.

Without trust in ‘experts’ such as environmental scientists we will not be able to build an informed consensus about the nature of the problems we face, let alone go about solving them. Without trust in politicians we will not be willing to accept difficult decisions with short-term costs but long-term benefits, including for younger and future generations. Without trust in supranational institutions, such as the EU and UN, we will not be able to coordinate our efforts in addressing many of the greatest threats to human welfare, all of which are supranational in nature. 

There has been much commentary about the generational divide in the Brexit vote, perhaps offering some hope for the future. Younger people supported Remain by a wide margin indicating a willingness to remain engaged with Europe. But younger generations turned out in much smaller numbers and low youth turnout is consistent with the evidence that millennials are less politically engaged than previous generations. They are also less trusting. (See evidence of mistrustful millennials here and here).

In short, young people appear to be more open to international cooperation, but disinclined to engage with domestic politics. In the worst case scenario, this could be a recipe for divisive politics in which motivated minorities on both sides of the political spectrum seize the centrist vacuum to promote their worldviews through formal political institutions.

What then does the future hold? The cacophony of narratives of next-steps is almost unprecedented in British history. No one appears to have a clear plan with an emergent consensus. But there is one potential ray of hope in this political drama. If young people—and millennials in particular—are shocked into engaging more actively and passionately with formal political institutions, the Brexit vote might well turnout not to be the canary in the mine so much as an important moment of political awakening.

Let us hope this is the case. For the future of environmental governance is ultimately in the hands of our worldly but politically disengaged youth.

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This blog is written by University of Bristol Cabot Institute members Dr Sean Fox (Political Economy of Development & Urban Geography) and Dr Malcolm Fairbrother (Global Policy and Politics), both from the School of Geographical Sciences.

Sean Fox

Read other blogs in the Brexit series:

Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the first below) and then brought together as a policy report for the Festival of the Future City in November. You can read other blogs from this series at the bottom of this blog. 

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In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been exploring new ways of engaging more widely with the city and the range of organisations that make up city life and, in particular, with the Green Capital Partnership and its members. One of these forms of engagement has been to convene a series of conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society, to try to move the discussion about Bristol’s future beyond what we already know to what it really means to be a future sustainable city and what capacities Bristol needs for the future – and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances.

Our first debate took the theme of ‘Devolution and new forms of governance’ on a beautiful sunny Bristol evening when an invited group of some 30 city people came together for the first of 4 conversations on the (sustainable) future of Bristol – its capacity, opportunities, needs and blockages. What follows are some of the big issues identified and the start of what we can do to address them.

We acknowledged that Bristol is, on the whole, a successful city, with a thriving economy, judged to be one of the best places to live, culturally vibrant and with a reputation for doing things differently – including being the only UK city to vote for a directly elected mayor in 2012. Bristol’s leadership is more visible locally, nationally and internationally now, it is a member of the UK ‘Core Cities Group’, and business finds it easier to work with – although not all parts of the city value these changes. Bristol also has another darker side, with high levels of child poverty, lower school achievement and a lack of investment in infrastructure.

Working together

First and perhaps inevitably, the conversation was about Bristol and its neighbouring local authority areas – the ‘Counties that used to be Avon’ (or CUBA for short). There is resistance from the other unitary areas to (re-) forming something akin to Avon with Bristol’s perceived dominance – a ‘mutual loathing and distrust’ between the authorities is surely something to be addressed. The authorities involved could choose not to ‘indulge in the loathing behaviour’ but re-approach one another in a spirit of mutual collaboration and partnership – which we are now starting to see as they consider the potential of the government’s offer for devolution to metro areas.

For Bristol in particular, the current authority boundaries are a real problem with ‘stupid red lines’ cutting across the urban area, particularly to the north and east, dividing parts of the city out into other local authority’s control and creating arguments about the positioning and ownership of services. The various local government boundary changes have, over time, seen an evolution to the current four unitaries with boundaries that are historical but make little sense in 2015. We have an overall population of about a million, with people travelling to work, shop and play across the boundaries and now there is an opportunity and a need for more effective working together, that, in one participant’s words, it ‘makes total sense to be one entity’ with more devolved powers and budgets (as the Manchester metro-region is doing) which will allow longer term fiscal planning. At the moment, layers of bureaucracy get in the way of getting things done. If Bristol is the ‘capital’, it needs to show that it is working for the whole region, that it can be supportive and empowering of all the urban and rural parts. The question now is how to create mechanisms that facilitate enduring collaboration in a locally relevant way and which can withstand the buffeting of national policy changes

Moral purpose and the ‘dark side’

So, how do we set up these enduring partnerships? We think it starts with finding a common moral purpose, something that everyone thinks we should be doing to help the city (and region) work better. This could be something to do with addressing the ‘dark side’ of the city and the inequalities that persist – for example there is a 10 year life expectancy gap between the richer and poorer parts of the city and that’s not ok. There’s 25% child poverty, a lack of real representation of different communities in the power and governance of the city and a segregation between and within communities (especially generationally) so that only certain voices are heard. So it’s not a very equal or well represented city, in fact less so than at the time of the St Paul’s Riots in the 1980s and this causes tensions. We need to set up governance structures locally that can address inequalities – because it’s not happening nationally – and we’re concerned with issues of social and environmental justice not just because it’s right but also because reducing inequalities will actually improve everyone’s lives.
Police facing rioters in City Road, St Pauls. Source: Wikipedia.

Finding out what stops action and who has the power

In developing new forms of governance, the city first needs to acknowledge where the current power and blockages are. We see that there are lots of visionary people coming up with amazing ideas which then don’t make it into reality – why is that? Who blocks innovation and why? Is it mostly to do with the short term nature of government policy and funding or is there something more fundamental going on that we could work to address and allow brave ideas to flourish better and at a bigger scale? We talked about the central initiatives that have come and gone over the years and acknowledge that we need to draw on and learn from history, taking the best from the local council and encouraging risk taking in order to flourish.

The low electoral turnouts show that people don’t currently connect well with their elected representatives and that more could be done to open those lines of communication and trust and improve the democratic process – meanwhile, so much interesting stuff is going on that isn’t done by the council at all but by other people.

Innovation in spite of rules

Bristol is an innovative city and lots of the best things have happened in spite of the rules, when communities and citizens have taken the initiative and made things happen. There has always been grassroots activity in the city, taking place without waiting for permission, and the council has allowed this – there’s no big municipalism compared with some cities in the north, so the city hasn’t crowded out initiative, but rather it has ceded power and allowed initiatives to emerge. The question then is whether formalising devolution within the city might kill the thing we’re trying to grow – how do we govern so that things happen because of policy rather than despite it? And how do we provide an environment where good ideas grow beyond the ‘bubbles of innovation’ that have flourished in this permissive environment? Now that the council is expected to let go of more areas of control because it has little budget, we are actually ahead of the curve and doing it – people in the city have the experience of making things happen in interesting ways.

A visible and much publicized example of local action is in the Stokes Croft area but it’s not the only place. The Stokes Croft ‘anti-Tesco riots’ showed that people will get up and protest against what they don’t want but, in another part of the city, a Tesco Metro would be a welcome source of decent food. So we have to acknowledge that locally relevant approaches are needed and that means community led responses – as we are now seeing in Redcliffe, Barton Hill, Southmead, Lawrence Weston and other places around the city. But not all communities currently have the capacity to take the lead, so helping to develop ‘collective action’ at different levels is key. Neighbourhood partnerships are at best a partial success, working best where there are active communities, but the potential to engage and use the resources of local business to support communities is untapped.

What next?

The people participating in these debates do not represent the spectrum of thought within Bristol but if we can start to untangle how the city is managed now and for the future then further conversation might involve different people from across the city. We might be a ‘leftie liberal’ group as one participant suggested but we’ve got lots of connections across the city which can be drawn on to take responsibility for doing something, whilst also recognizing that we can’t change everything all at once!

One idea was that we should start with an issue or sector of concern such as transport or housing and explore it at all the different levels, working together to see how a new governance model would play out in reality. For example, take transport, this impacts on everyone’s quality of life and has a disproportionately high impact on the poorest people and their ability to move around the city and hence has a direct impact on equalities.

So, where does all this get us? We’ve talked about the relationship between communities and the city, the relationship between the city and its neighbouring councils and the relationship between that collective and central government – all of which need to be negotiated in the terms of possible devolutionary structures. We’ve recognized the flourishing of community innovation that will stand us in good stead as we move into a new city-region future whilst also needing to understand the powers and blockages that enhance or impede risk taking.

There are three more debates and through them we aim to develop and strengthen the relationship between the university and civil society in the city so that we can collaborate in the long term for the benefit of the city. It is also about a real concern for our city, taking advantage of the year’s Green Capital status to look at how Bristol (and other cities) can develop into the future – drawing on the knowledge and expertise galvanized in 2015 and trying to create a legacy that will live long after this year of activity and debate.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird

Green Deal delivery: Investigating Local Authority delivery models and their implementation

Posted on by janet.crompton
During this summer and as a part of my dissertation thesis I have collaborated with Bristol CityCouncil in order to investigate local authority delivery models and their implementation towards the Green Deal governmental scheme.
 

Background

The Green Deal is a recent UK government finance framework introduced by the Energy Act 2011. It was formally launched on 28 January 2013 in England & Wales and on 25 February 2013 in Scotland. The Green Deal scheme has a target of reducing CO2 emissions derived from British properties through energy efficiency improvements. It provides householders and businesses an up-front capital to carry out energy efficiency improvements to their properties (e.g. wall insulation, replace boilers etc.) with repayments made through energy bills. The Local Authorities get involved in the scheme by choosing one of the following Green Deal delivery models:

Promoter. Promoting the Green Deal to their local residents through website pages, leaflets etc.
Partner. Cooperating with the private sector Green Deal Provider to facilitate delivery of the Green Deal to their local area.
Provider. Becoming a Green Deal Provider co-ordinating finance and delivery to local residents.

In this project I am interested in finding out:

  • How local authorities implement and deliver the Green Deal.
  • Why city councils make specific choices regarding the Green Deal delivery model.
  • Likely risks, benefits, issues encountered and lessons learned by far by implementing and delivering the Green Deal in such a way.
  • How city councils’ strategic action could ensure the success of the scheme.
In general I would like to identify if the Green Deal is an adequate, well-operated and clear policy for the Local Authorities and the public. If this is the case I would like to point out which is the best route to achieve that.

For that reason I am currently conducting interviews with eight England Core cities, namely: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield City Councils. In 2012 these core cities got funding from DECC in order to kick start the Green Deal and test peoples’ attitude for the scheme. Consequently, I would like to see how the city councils developed from their pilots schemes, what delivery routes are following now and what are the key lessons learned by implementing the Green Deal.

Furthermore, as I stated earlier an objective of the dissertation will be the councils’ strategic actions. One of the Bristol City Council’s strategic actions is to use community groups to spread the word about the Green Deal framework. In that way there is the potential to increase the take up of energy efficiency measures in a cost-efficient way. As a result, I am conducting interviews with Bristol Community Groups as well in order to evaluate if their approach towards the Green Deal scheme and the engagement with householders is successful. If not, I would like to find out how this could be improved in the future.

Why it is important to understand how the Green Deal is being delivered?

Green Deal belongs in a wider category of policies namely, energy efficiency measures. Nowadays, more and more countries around the world try to reduce their greenhouse gases by following strategies and by implementing specific policies. The success of the Green Deal scheme is of a greatest importance to mitigate climate change since 40% of CO2 emissions in the UK is derived from domestic properties. The contribution and the engagement of Local Authorities is a proactive step towards the successful implementation and execution of the scheme. Nevertheless this is not always the case. So, what happens if a national policy lacks clear orientation, objectives and is confusing for Local Authorities to implement and too difficult for people to understand it? Then is time for policy makers to take action and consider likely scenarios to ameliorate the Green Deal. I hope that my dissertation would help towards that route and I would personally try to make some decent recommendations for future consideration.

If you are interested in learning more about my project please don’t hesitate to contact me at:

 

 dk13040@my.bristol.ac.uk
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This blog has been written by Despoina Kyrkili, an MSc student studying Environmental Policy and Management at the University of Bristol who has been undertaking a Community Based Learning Project at the Cabot Institute.

 

Despoina Kyrkili
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